Buy Your Mama a Llama!

For thousands of years llamas have helped families carry loads up and down steep slopes in Latin American countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru.  Llamas help preserve a traditional way of life, and their soft wool makes warm ponchos and sweaters.

Llama Facts

• Llamas have four stomachs to help them efficiently digest a variety of foods.
• Llamas like to stay in a herd.
• A llama can stand 5 to 6 feet tall, weigh up to 400 pounds, and live as long as 20 years.
• Families comb or shear their llamas’ warm fur to produce up to 10 pounds of fleece per year to sell or spin.

Llama Tale

Cotopaxi is a highland province in central Ecuador.  At an altitude of 11,000 feet, it’s at the edge of the treeline and the grassland is fragile.  People who live there are almost all indigenous, and 80 percent live below the poverty line.

One reason people are hungry is that, year by year, farmland has crept up the Andes mountains, but, year by year, it has produced less.  Cutting down trees has encouraged soil to wash down the steep hillsides.  As families move higher up the mountain, water sources dry up, and the cycle of desperation and destruction continues.

But the alpaca, a smaller, soft–coated cousin of the llama, is at home in Ecuador, although it has been dying out.  Heifer has reintroduced 35 valuable alpacas to 50 Cotopaxi families, teaching them to alternate grazing with fodder from specially grown indigenous trees and how to process the wool. Since working together on common land is a strong indigenous tradition, families gladly take turns caring for the alpacas, and they are restoring native grasses and trees that once grew abundantly. With 20 young alpacas being born a year and the land beginning to thrive once more, they know that their traditional way of life can continue.

(Information provided by the Heifer International Living Gift Market guide and Heifer International’s Animal Crackers educational resource)